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©The Author(s) 2025. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Psychiatry. Oct 19, 2025; 15(10): 111286
Published online Oct 19, 2025. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v15.i10.111286
Published online Oct 19, 2025. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v15.i10.111286
Threat-related attentional bias in subjects with different looming cognitive styles: Evidence based on eye-tracking study
Xuan Wang, Business School, Central University of Finance and Economics, Beijing 100081, China
Xuan Wang, School of Literature, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang 550025, Guizhou Province, China
Shuai Chen, Wen-Peng Cai, Faculty of Psychology, Naval Medical University, Shanghai 200433, China
Bin Tian, Psychological center, Institute of Student Affairs, Shanghai Jian Qiao University, Shanghai 20 200433, China
Co-corresponding authors: Bin Tian and Wen-Peng Cai.
Author contributions: Wang X contributed to methodology, formal analysis, data collection, follow-up, writing, reviewing, and editing; Chen S contributed to data collection, data curation, follow-up, formal analysis, writing, reviewing, and editing; Tian B was involved in supervision and follow-up and data curation; Cai WP contributed to conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, writing, reviewing, and editing; All authors contributed to the interpretation of the study and approved the final version to be published.
Supported by the Shanghai Municipal Health Commission, China, No. GWV-10.2-YQ46.
Institutional review board statement: The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Naval Medical University (Approval No. GWV-10.2-YQ46) and complied with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.
Informed consent statement: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
STROBE statement: The authors have read the CONSORT 2010 Statement, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the CONSORT 2010 Statement.
Data sharing statement: The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Open Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Wen-Peng Cai, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Psychology, Naval Medical University, No. 800 Xiangyin Road, Shanghai 200433, China.
Received: July 3, 2025
Revised: July 21, 2025
Accepted: August 19, 2025
Published online: October 19, 2025
Processing time: 85 Days and 22.1 Hours
Revised: July 21, 2025
Accepted: August 19, 2025
Published online: October 19, 2025
Processing time: 85 Days and 22.1 Hours
Core Tip
Core Tip: This eye-tracking study reveals a threat-related attentional bias in individuals with high looming cognitive style (LCS). High LCS individuals exhibited a vigilance-avoidance pattern characterized by initial vigilance toward threat stimuli, followed by attentional avoidance, alongside sustained attentional maintenance to threat. Paradoxically, they also showed prolonged overall attention to threat. This temporal dissociation between early vigilance and later avoidance, captured via precise eye-movement metrics, refines the Looming Vulnerability Model and provides crucial empirical evidence on the dynamic attentional mechanisms underlying threat perception in cognitive vulnerability.